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The New Yorker contributing writer Ruth Marcus joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss Donald Trump’s “revenge tour”—his effort to use the levers of government to settle personal and political scores. They talk about the indictment of the former F.B.I. director James Comey, why legal experts see the case against Comey as alarmingly weak, and how Trump’s campaign of retribution has expanded to include prosecutors, lawmakers, and even the families of his critics. They also consider how Trump’s quest for vengeance is testing the limits of American law, and whether the country can avoid a permanent cycle of political retaliation and lawfare.

This week’s reading:

“The Flimsy, Dangerous Indictment of James Comey,” by Ruth Marcus

“What Will Bari Weiss Do to CBS News?,” by Jon Allsop

“Who Can Lead the Democrats?,” by Amy Davidson Sorkin

“The Volunteers Tracking ICE in Los Angeles,” by Oren Peleg

“Why Israel and Hamas Might Finally Have a Deal,” by Isaac Chotiner

Tune in to The Political Scene wherever you get your podcasts.

“If I Had Legs I’d Kick You,” a nerve-shredding dark comedy from the director and screenwriter Mary Bronstein, is the latest and surely most exhaustive iteration of an idea that has gained increasing traction in American movies: motherhood is hell, and a mother enduring that hell should say so, without fear of judgment. Marielle Heller’s “Nightbitch” (2024), drawn from Rachel Yoder’s novel, laid out a higher-concept version of this argument: it showed us an artist so drained and defeated by life with a toddler that she transformed into a feral canine at night—a quasi-supernatural twist that, for all its cleverness, felt oddly neutered in the translation from page to screen. The director Maggie Gyllenhaal dramatized maternal ambivalence more incisively in her adaptation, from 2021, of the Elena Ferrante novel “The Lost Daughter,” about a middle-aged professor who spends a coastal holiday reflecting on the failure of being, in her words, “an unnatural mother.”

Bronstein’s film—her first since her début feature, “Yeast” (2008)—boasts its own version of that line. “I’m one of those people who’s not supposed to be a mom,” a mother named Linda (Rose Byrne) laments. Her young daughter (Delaney Quinn) has a chronic gastrointestinal illness, and her husband, a ship captain, is away at sea. In the space of several fraught days, an already difficult situation is compounded by nightmarish setbacks. An enormous hole opens up in the ceiling of Linda’s apartment, flooding the place and forcing her and her daughter to relocate to a motel. Linda, who is a therapist, must balance her job with the inevitably time-consuming repairs, which grind to a halt when a contractor has a family emergency. (Such emergencies are legion in this movie.) Linda also drags her daughter to a clinic for regular treatments, none of which seem to do any good. There, she is repeatedly scolded, first by a testy parking attendant (Mark Stolzenberg), and then by a doctor (Bronstein), who warns Linda of consequences if her daughter doesn’t soon reach her target weight of fifty pounds.

Bronstein, her every utterance brimming with deadpan passive-aggression, was shrewd to cast herself as one of Linda’s many antagonists. It’s a mordantly self-aware touch, as if she were confessing to, but also exacerbating, her own heavy-handed tactics behind the camera, as she pushes Linda toward wild dramatic extremes. But Linda can handle those extremes, up to a point. Early on at the clinic, her daughter, identifying the main difference between her parents, describes her dad as firm but her mom as “stretchable”—an assessment that Linda rejects, clearly stung, but which her every subsequent action bears out. It’s a measure of the film’s fairness that it sees this quality as both strength and weakness. It is, after all, Linda’s pliability that allows her to laugh rather than cry over an almost-ruined dinner, just as it’s her considerable patience that helps her get through a stream of difficult patients at her workplace, called the Center for Psychological Arts. (They’re played by the actors Danielle Macdonald, Daniel Zolghadri, and Ella Beatty, among others.) But Linda’s flexibility can backfire, too, as when she caves in to her daughter’s incessant demands and buys her a pet hamster—an ill-advised decision, with grisly yet mercifully short-lived consequences.

Byrne the actor turns out to be stretchable in the best sense; her performance is a marvel of tragicomic elasticity. Whatever she’s doing at any given moment—rolling her eyes, sleepily mumbling instructions into her phone, dragging herself down a hallway in a haze, or releasing her frustration in a barely muffled scream—she has the rare ability to seem at once psychologically stripped down and physically invigorated by the unyielding scrutiny of the camera. (The director of photography Christopher Messina shot much of the film in extreme closeup.) In some of Byrne’s more memorable big-screen roles—a rich, pampered queen bee in “Bridesmaids” (2011), an imperious Bulgarian arms dealer in “Spy” (2015)—she made a natural comic villain, a smug, hyper-competent rival to a bumbling misfit heroine. “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” flips that script in inspired fashion; here, Linda is the bumbler, or so everyone around her seems to think.

As in “The Lost Daughter,” a beach beckons powerfully. “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” is set in Montauk, and the water seems to exert an almost gravitational pull on Linda’s psyche, as if the sea’s raging undercurrents are of a piece with her own. Like “Nightbitch,” too, Bronstein’s film has an element of nocturnal horror: Linda doesn’t turn into a dog, but as she wanders the neighborhood after dark her demons feel thoroughly unleashed. The delineations of night and day are so stark that, at times, her adventures take on an almost vampiric quality: when the sun is out, she seems drained, boxed in, and all but immobilized by her schedule. After nightfall, at least, while her child sleeps, she can sneak out for a bottle of wine, a puff of weed, or something stronger. She attempts to procure the latter with the help of a motel superintendent, James, with whom she strikes up a goofily unpredictable, often combative friendship. (James is played by the rapper A$AP Rocky, in his second strong performance of the year, after Spike Lee’s “Highest 2 Lowest.”) These are fugitive pleasures, but for Linda, they’re a crucial respite. They allow her to convince herself, if only for an hour or two, that she still has some semblance of a life of her own.

When “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” premièred, earlier this year, at the Sundance and Berlin International Film Festivals, its non-stop panic-attack aesthetic prompted critical invocations of the brothers Josh and Benny Safdie, whose films, such as “Daddy Longlegs” (2009), “Good Time” (2017), and especially “Uncut Gems” (2019), made for similarly stressful viewing. The comparisons were logical; Bronstein is married to the filmmaker, editor, and actor Ronald Bronstein, who has worked on the Safdies’ films in numerous capacities and served as one of the producers of “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You.” Unwise as it may be to assume a Safdie net of familial influences, it’s hard to avoid them here, especially in the case of a movie that is especially attuned to the nuances of marital give-and-take.

From scene to scene, “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” can feel so formally aggressive, verging on assaultive, that it takes a moment to appreciate that it’s also a movie of strategic elisions and structured absences. Linda’s daughter is never identified by name, and she is often heard but seldom seen. In Bronstein’s riskiest formal gambit, the child’s face is carefully hidden from view, in every shot except one. The girl is, instead, abstracted into various body parts: a pair of legs dangling from a toilet, or a belly from which a feeding tube protrudes—an image that emphasizes her near-umbilical dependence on Linda. At night, the girl is reduced to a cluster of noises: the beeps and whirs of a machine that she’s hooked up to while she sleeps, or the whimpers and snores emanating from the baby monitor that Linda carries during her long walks after dark. When she’s awake, though, Linda’s daughter is a voice, and a highly active, spirited one, forever laughing, chattering, demanding, and whining up a storm. The concealment of the daughter’s face is a blunt but effective representation of one of Bronstein’s central ideas: how the people we love can drain us to the point where we no longer actually see them for who they are.

The other glaringly absent figure is Linda’s husband, Charles, who is played by Christian Slater but, for most of the film, is only a voice on the other end of a phone line, shouting irritably and defensively in Linda’s ear. Charles is hardly the only self-appointed male breadwinner to project an entitled indifference toward his wife and child. When one patient, a new mother experiencing postpartum depression, commits an impulsive, desperate act, Linda is forced to contend with her own physically and emotionally unavailable husband. It is one of the script’s most aggravating exchanges, and in such moments the story’s extreme subjectivity of perspective suddenly feels startlingly clear-eyed and diagnostic of a larger societal syndrome: so many dictatorial male voices, and so few loving male faces or helpful male bodies attached to them.

There are exceptions, sort of. James is one of them, though his kindly attempts to be there for Linda, as amateur repairman and reluctant babysitter, have a way of backfiring, usually on himself. At work, Linda seeks counselling of her own with a peevish down-the-hall colleague, who’s played, in his feature-acting début, by a superbly stone-faced Conan O’Brien. Not an especially sympathetic listener (another sly joke, given O’Brien’s fame as a late-night interviewer), he nonetheless teaches Linda something of value regarding the strict maintenance of boundaries—something she clearly has trouble with—and the importance of taking action rather than wallowing in indecision. “Make a choice,” he tells a difficult client at one point. The advice isn’t directed at Linda, but she clearly takes it to heart, especially when the time comes to take crucial steps toward getting her and her daughter’s lives back on track.

In cinema, a hole in a ceiling is typically an ominous sign—something to induce shudders of dread, whether in a horror film like “Dark Water” (2002) or a sinister dark comedy like “A Different Man” (2024). “The Hole” (1998), by the director Tsai Ming-liang, wrought a more whimsical variation on this idea, treating an architectural defect as a gateway to romantic possibility. Bronstein infuses the device with her own Lynchian tremors of fright, at times sending the camera up through the ceiling, as if it were a portal into the darkest recesses of Linda’s psyche. In the end, though, she probes those caverns with a genuinely reparative aim in mind. Presenting Linda with two open wounds—one in the ceiling, and one in her child’s flesh—the film suggests, with sly wit and bristling optimism, that the solutions to both problems might be one and the same. In “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You,” motherhood isn’t just hell but a hellhole—which means that it, too, can be closed up for good. ♦

When the children’s author Kate DiCamillo was a girl, she would listen over and over to a record of the Brothers Grimm story “The Juniper Tree”—in which, among other terrors, a child is decapitated. “I was not a kid who liked to be frightened,” DiCamillo said recently. But, she added, stories like the Grimms’ taught her “how to be brave in the face of that terror—which is a terror we all feel, not just kids. To wit, here I am, at sixty-one, going back to these stories and finding more comfort, more terror, and ever more relevance.” DiCamillo, who has two books out this fall—“Lost Evangeline,” along with a twenty-fifth-anniversary edition of her best-selling “Because of Winn-Dixie”—joined us not long ago to recommend some of her favorite books of and about fairy tales. Her commentary—a mix of written remarks and conversation—has been edited and condensed.

The Juniper Tree and Other Tales from Grimm

by the Brothers Grimm, translated from the German by Lore Segal and Randall Jarrell

These funny, terrifying stories (and the funny, terrifying illustrations, by Maurice Sendak, that accompany them in this edition) are a direct route to the collective subconscious. Each one is utterly familiar and utterly strange.

Something wonderful about the Grimms is how their stories are a kind of door between the fantastical and the facts of what it means to be human in the world. They’re a hinge between the historical truth and, on the other side, the truth of the human condition—of the way things are, and have been, and will forever be.

Fairy Tales

by Hans Christian Andersen, translated from the Danish by Tiina Nunnally

I grew up with Hans Christian Andersen. I can’t even articulate the impact that his sensibility has had on my sensibility. In his work, everything is animate, everything has a soul, everything has a story. Boy, that got me at a very young age. His work convinced me that all things (matchsticks and tin soldiers, flowers and fir trees) are sentient, that every being has a heart, and that every heart can be broken.

Like the Grimm stories, there’s a way that Andersen’s seem to belong to the collective imagination—they’ve been told and retold. But one thing that makes his quite different is that they’re much more about the individual. In Grimm, the adults are just tossing children out into the world, and the world is a terrible place. But in Andersen’s stories there’s much more about the individual’s journey. Like in “The Ugly Duckling,” where you feel so profoundly the sorrow of the main character’s never fitting in.

Winter’s Tales

by Isak Dinesen

I came to Dinesen through the film “Out of Africa.” Then I read the biography of her by Judith Thurman, whom I love. Dinesen’s first collection of stories is “Seven Gothic Tales.” Thurman quotes a passage from one of those stories, “The Old Chevalier,” that I think might help reveal why she wrote it:

Reality had met me such a short time ago, in such an ugly shape, that I had no wish to come into contact with it again. Somewhere in me a dark fear was still crouching, and I took refuge within the fantastic like a distressed child in his book of fairy tales. I did not want to look ahead, and not at all to look back.

My favorite story in “Winter’s Tales” is the harrowing “Sorrow-Acre,” which is a retelling of a folk story. It’s about a mother who threshes an entire field by herself—that is, who does the impossible—to save her son’s life. It undoes me every time—and it also makes me feel like you can perform the heroic even when you don’t think you can. Dinesen didn’t start writing until she was much older. She drew on a lifetime of experience, and that gives these fairy tales the authority to say, I’ve made it through. You can make it through.

The Mythmakers

by John Hendrix

This is a graphic novel about the friendship between C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, who became acquainted when they were faculty members at Oxford and went on to form a writing group, Inklings, where members would read their work aloud to one another. I was never a big Tolkien reader, but I did love “The Chronicles of Narnia” as a kid—they were so magical to me that I never dared to go back to them as an adult, for fear that the magic wouldn’t be there.

I found this book fascinating and moving. So much of it is about how Lewis and Tolkien’s friendship gave birth to their works, and how those works reflect their times. Both men were in the trenches in World War One, and Hendrix really shows how their need to make stories was shaped by the upheaval and great horror they lived through. Graphic novels aren’t my favorite way to read, because I’m so drawn to the written word, but it’s very powerful having the wasteland of the trenches drawn out for you. You see it, you feel it, and then you feel the stories arising out of that. It’s, like, how do I make sense out of this? How do I comfort myself, with all this loneliness and terror? You tell a story that then can comfort somebody else in their loneliness and their terror.

The Argentinean author Ariana Harwicz writes slim books that draw on a slim band of resources, as if she pulled them from a narrow row of diseased crops, or from the soil atop a shallow grave. Her composite antihero is a mother gone mad in a rural village in France. There are flies in the folds of her kitchen curtains, probably, and a machete left out on the lawn. She is besieged on all sides—by her in-laws, by social workers, by untreated psychosis—and yet in possession of a terrible freedom. She wishes she were dead, but she’s inclined toward killing someone else first. She is overwhelmed by anger and lust, an alchemical compound that can alter matter, energy, laws of physics. Characters teleport, rewind themselves—the reader is often unsure of where she is in time and space—and traverse the boundaries between species. In Harwicz’s “Die, My Love,” the unravelling protagonist’s lover presents as “a crazy fox on the roadside”; after she sleeps with him, she expects to “have a beak, feathers, talons.” Her superego, or maybe her id, keeps materializing in the form of a stag, and she sees her baby through the eyes of a crab. The narrator of Harwicz’s “Feebleminded” describes her brain as “moths in a jar, hanging themselves.” The opening line of another novel, “Tender,” is “I wake up gaping like a force-fed duck when they strip its liver out to make foie gras.”

“Die, My Love,” which was long-listed for the 2018 International Booker Prize and has been adapted into an upcoming film starring Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson, is Harwicz’s best-known work. It can be fairly categorized as a work of postpartum psychological horror, a transatlantic cousin to Rachel Yoder’s “Nightbitch,” in which the tensile stress between thwarted professional ambition and maternal longing starts to turn a woman into a dog, or to the title story of Karen Russell’s collection “Orange World,” wherein an anxious, sleep-deprived new mother comes to the conclusion that she is breastfeeding Satan. These are essentially gothic works, in which bleary, nocturnal isolation opens a door to bizarre impulses and uncanny transformations.

Harwicz’s novels are more hallucinatory than supernatural—but a more provocative distinction between her books and others in this semi-subgenre is that, for her characters, motherhood does not cause animal rage and instability so much as instantiate them. At one point in “Die, My Love,” the unnamed protagonist sits back and watches as her baby crawls toward a fireplace and burns his hands; at another, she sticks crackers in his mouth until he chokes. She was always like this, one suspects, only now she has a kid. “Mummy was happy before the baby came,” she muses. That’s an unreliable narrator.

“Unfit,” Harwicz’s latest novella to appear in English, was published in Spanish last year as “Perder el Juicio,” which carries the double meaning of losing one’s mind and losing one’s case. The unhinged narrator, Lisa, is, like Harwicz herself, a Jewish Argentinean woman living in a small French village. She has been accused of domestic violence—the details are left hazy—involving her estranged husband, Armand, who is the father of her five-year-old twin sons. Scores of eyewitnesses have come out against her, Lisa says, but these are “fake resistance fighters, informing on collaborators, collaborators passing themselves off as heroes.” Armand and his parents have custody of the twins, whom Lisa can see for supervised visits just once a month, “even less than terrorists’ families,” she complains.

No one is on Lisa’s side in what she perceives as a literal war, especially not her antisemitic in-laws, whom she imagines speculating about the so-called Israelite among them: “I’ve heard they wear wigs and never wash their private parts, that they smell like cooking oil.” Despite a restraining order against her, Lisa skulks around the twins’ school at drop-off and stalks them in the grocery store. She wants them back seemingly less out of primal longing and more out of spite, or out of umbrage that she’s been robbed of her rightful possessions. Almost on impulse, Lisa sets fire to the house and yard adjacent to where Armand and the boys are staying with the in-laws; the conflagration lures the adults from their home—“like rats from their hidden den,” Lisa thinks—and gives her the chance to steal into the main house and reclaim her boys. A road trip ensues, sort of, albeit one in which the reader is not always clear on who’s inside or outside the car.

All of Harwicz’s novels unfold at a sprint and feel at ease with narrative ambiguity and spatial confusion. But “Unfit,” which is translated, from the Spanish, by Jessie Mendez Sayer, feels especially rushed and patchy with elisions. These tendencies are most consequential in the kidnapping scene, a gnarled set piece that, in its planning and execution, seems to defy even dream logic. The vagueness and disorientation are plausibly by design, meant to evoke the fracturing of Lisa’s sanity, perhaps. How much the reader should sympathize with Lisa—whether the character whom Harwicz has created is more aptly seen as a wronged person lashing out or as a more lucid villain—also feels unresolved.

Like many of Harwicz’s characters, Lisa is a zealot of sorts—and an avatar of the author’s unusual belief in the value and importance of hatred. “This era, in literary terms, does not know how to hate,” Harwicz wrote, on X, last year. In her books, anything that smacks of compassion or tenderness deserves, at best, strategic suspicion. “Love is bribery in the plain light of day,” Lisa says, “a padlocked emergency exit, fireworks aimed at the sky.” Love is a show of virtue, a branding exercise, a cynical transaction. Love is commerce; hate is art.

Harwicz has told interviewers that “Unfit” has echoes of her own divorce proceedings, during which she says she faced sexist and antisemitic discrimination, and of the case of Sofía Troszynski, an Argentinean woman who fought an international custody battle with her French-born husband over their toddler daughter; mother and child later disappeared. It also seems significant that Harwicz was in the last months of completing the manuscript for “Unfit” on October 7, 2023, when Hamas launched its brutal attack on Israel—a cataclysm that, according to Harwicz, reconfigured her sense of her place in the world. “If I had to write my biography—my invented life, another book of fiction—I would start with October 7th,” Harwicz has said.

Even a reader who was unfamiliar with that comment might think of the events of October 7th when reading “Unfit,” particularly during the passage describing Lisa’s kidnapping of her sons. As she carries her sleeping boys to her car, one and then the other, she imagines “rescuing bodies from an ambush by fanatics.” She speeds away from the scene, but, in her mind, the ambush is still under way: if “I heard the fanatics coming,” she thinks, “I would hide underneath other bodies.” She drives past ditches that “are filled with the metal skeletons of burned-out, abandoned cars,” and looks forward to the boys waking up so that they can celebrate a “successful hostage exchange.” She imagines candlelight vigils and frantic searches through charred rubble, and imagines digging tunnels. She sees missing-person posters. When she argues with Armand on the phone—Harwicz does not clearly signpost who is saying what—one spouse warns that the other will “soon understand the legitimate right to self-defense.”

These evocations of the iconography of October 7th may or may not be coincidental, but the language and imagery take on an additional charge when considered alongside Harwicz’s public statements on the war in Gaza. In her view, criticism of Israel’s retaliatory bombardment and blockade, which have resulted in more than sixty-seven thousand recorded deaths, is Nazism by another name. She has said that genocide accusations against Israel are a result of “brainwashing and Qatari money,” and that learning many of her peers are sympathetic to Palestinians’ plight under occupation was “like discovering your father is a rapist or a murderer.” She has compared the Jewish philosopher Judith Butler, a longtime critic of Israel, to a Nazi collaborator, and has said that the actress Cate Blanchett’s decision to wear a green, white, and black dress to a red-carpet première, evoking the colors of the Palestinian flag, represents “the height of decadence, the absolute paroxysm of the absurd, of what will lead us to a Third World War.” (Harwicz has not yet weighed in publicly on recent statements by Jennifer Lawrence, the star of “Die, My Love,” describing Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide.)

As ever, one can be grateful to Roland Barthes and his “Death of the Author” for trying to hold open the exit door from all this. Harwicz’s books are most generously appreciated as spelunking missions into the cave of the unwell mind, untethered from our op-ed pages or the unspeakable carnage available to us every day on our Instagram reels. Still, as I read and reread “Unfit,” with its kidnapping plot and its fury about enemies and collaborators, Harwicz’s conviction that hatred is essential to art began to seem as much ideological as it is aesthetic. When Harwicz complained, on X, that her literary peers needed more hate in their hearts, she cited a few dead guys who did have it: Voltaire, T. S. Eliot, Céline. Their bigotry, she wrote, “was in service of the work, of a unique language of contempt.” She’s right that, these days, it’s hard to find a writer who can twirl a vile trope into tetrameter filigree quite like Old Possum. But it’s harder to imagine the contemporary absence of such a writer as a loss.

It’s exemplary of Harwicz’s rancorous outlook that, in her public statements, she often invokes extortion. To Harwicz, anti-Israel sentiment in the literary and academic world, if not a direct result of antisemitism, is a product of extortion—a thing people feel forced to do in exchange for not being called racist. “If they accuse you of being racist,” she has said, “that means you’re thinking straight.” She has named the Israeli novelist David Grossman, who recently stated that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, as a victim of extortion. American universities where faculty and students have expressed pro-Palestinian views are guilty of “ideological extortion.” In 2021, when the Tanzanian-British author Abdulrazak Gurnah, a critic of Israel, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature—the first Black or African writer to win in many years—Harwicz wrote that the win was the product of an “extortion operation,” and characterized it as “humanitarian propaganda.” (The Nobel citation praised Gurnah’s “uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism.” Harwicz wrote, in reply, “Art does not answer to human solidarity, nor does it submit to the laws of the time.”)

Thankfully, most readers do not regard the writers they admire as either agents or victims of a vast covert-influence op. And it’s good for Harwicz that they don’t. Otherwise, they might be inclined to dismiss her fiction as misanthropic agitprop when, at its best, it’s something far more unnerving and unknowable, like a rabid fox on the roadside, or like a postpartum woman who grows feathers and talons, or like a mother who steals her own kids. ♦

The “lumpenproletariat,” according to “The Communist Manifesto,” is “the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society.” Lower than proletariat workers, the lumpenproletariat includes the indigent and the unemployable, those cast out of the workforce with no recourse, or those who can’t enter it in the first place, such as young workers in times of economic depression. According to some in Silicon Valley, this sorry category will soon encompass much of the human population, as a new lumpenproletariat—or, in modern online parlance, a “permanent underclass”—is created by the accelerating progress of artificial intelligence.

The idea of a permanent underclass has recently been embraced in part as an online joke and in part out of a sincere fear about how A.I. automation will upend the labor market and create a new norm of inequality. In an A.I.-dominated future, those with capital will buy “compute” (the tech term for A.I. horsepower) and use it to accomplish work once done by humans: anything from coding software to designing marketing campaigns to managing factories. Those without the same resources will be stuck with few alternatives. A sense of dread about this impending A.I. caste system has created a new urgency to get ahead while you still can. “You have 2 years to create a podcast in order to escape the permanent underclass,” one Silicon Valley meme account, @creatine_cycle, posted recently on X, suggesting that perhaps fame can still save you. “Honestly if you don’t want to be a part of the permanent underclass you should probably ship slop asap,” another person posted, using the slang term for any A.I.-generated or augmented content; in other words, start leaning in to A.I. products or stay poor forever. The creator of @creatine_cycle is Jayden Clark, a former musician turned entrepreneur working in San Francisco. His niche posts satirize the id of the tech industry, which he has seen change radically since the advent of the A.I. gold rush. In the future that A.I. hustlers envision, Clark told me, “nobody’s working anymore.” He continued, “whoever hasn’t gotten in, you have no other chance to climb the ladder.”

The worries of a looming deadline for employability stem in part from an influential essay, published last year by the researcher and former OpenAI employee Leopold Aschenbrenner, predicting that A.I. will reach or exceed human capacity in 2027. Aschenbrenner writes that it is “strikingly plausible” that, by then, “models will be able to do the work of an AI researcher/engineer.” At that point, technological progress would become self-reinforcing, operating on a runaway feedback loop: A.I. would build more powerful A.I. on its own, rendering humans superfluous. Nate Soares, a prominent A.I. pessimist, the president of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, and co-author of a recent best-selling book on A.I. titled “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies,” told me, “In Silicon Valley, it’s like everyone’s seen a ghost.” He continued, “We don’t know how long there is on the clock” before the dawn of full A.I. automation. Regardless of his own existential fears about the technology, Soares said, “people should not be banking on work in the long term.” The tech jobs may be the first victims, not unlike how Frankenstein’s monster killed its creator. Then comes the wider world of digitized labor: writing e-mails, filling out spreadsheets, making presentations. Finally, self-innovating A.I. will develop intelligent machines to better perform physical tasks. Whatever A.I. can do better, it will, according to Soares: “Humans are just not the most efficient arrangement of matter to do almost any job.”

The fear of a permanent underclass stems in part from the progress that A.I. has already made. Whether we want it or not, the technology is creeping into our daily lives. Both OpenAI and Meta have recently launched feeds of purely A.I.-generated videos, auguring an era of social media in which even the most elaborate content we consume is no longer created by humans. Workaday corporate software such as Salesforce is being amped up with A.I.-powered “agents” that can independently perform tasks for users. Waymo cars drive themselves through the streets of major cities. Some economic statistics are already hinting at a hiring slowdown, particularly among new workers; this year, the unemployment rate for recent American college graduates surpassed the national average, an anomaly that an Oxford Economics report primarily blamed on A.I. automation. Entry-level software engineers are facing particular difficulty. Jasmine Sun, a former employee of Substack who writes a newsletter covering the culture of Silicon Valley, told me, of tech workers, “Many are really struggling and can’t find even a normal salary, and some of the people are raking it in with these never-seen-before tech salaries. That creates this sense of bifurcation.”

The new desirable employee archetype is a “cracked twenty-two-year-old,” Sun said, using the slang for a hyperproductive, extremely online programmer who might work “nine-nine-six,” a term adopted from workers in China that refers to a schedule of 9 A.M. to 9 P.M., six days a week. The only way to escape the permanent A.I. underclass, ironically, is to lean in and hustle in a bot-like way. “Rather than being politically radicalized, everyone grinds harder,” Sun said. The reward for the grind might be a role as an overlord of the A.I. future: the closer to collaborating with the machine you are, the more power you will have. Fears of a permanent underclass reflect the fact that there is not yet a coherent vision for how a future A.I.-dominated society will be structured. Sun said, of the Silicon Valley élites pushing accelerationism, “They’re not thinking through the economic implications; no one has a plan for redistribution or Universal Basic Income.” What will be left for the underlings, it seems, is a bleak world of A.I.-generated content and the semblance of companionship from chatbots. As Sun put it, “Are you going to be the piggy or be the one making the slop?”

To get a sense of how non-tech workers are thinking about A.I.’s threat of economic segregation, I put out a query on my social-media accounts. I heard from Jabari Canada, a cinematographer who pivoted to architecture after realizing that his film-production work would soon be automated. Agnieszka Bąk, a math tutor in Poland, told me she couldn’t trust her students to do their own work anymore but also doubted her own policy of abstaining from A.I.: “Am I setting myself up for failure because I refuse to give in?” Chris, a brand strategist in London, told me, “I have genuinely considered retraining as something like a plumber. I doubt they’ll be able to replace the opposable thumb in my lifetime.” Arielle Pardes, a journalist, said that she’s been working in the beverage industry because it feels intrinsically human: “Robots can’t taste wine.” Everyone is “thinking about how to future-proof our ways of generating an income,” Pardes added. The stablest industries, it stands to reason, might be those that cater to the extremely wealthy, who will continue collecting wine and other luxury prizes. Pivot toward those, or just flee to the woods to pursue a kind of neo-Amish, anti-tech self-sufficiency. “Tell me where the commune is and I’m packing my bags with a one-way ticket,” Bąk said.

In Marx and Engels’s “The Communist Manifesto” formulation, A.I.’s underclass might eventually join the proletariat revolution. But that would require a collective recognition of the technology’s oppressive effects, and class consciousness could be hard to raise in an era when media feeds and information consumption are increasingly shaped by A.I. itself. Marx and Engels believed that the lumpenproletariat was especially vulnerable to political manipulation: the group’s grim conditions, he wrote, “prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.” It’s easy to imagine a similar dynamic playing out, already, among those hoping to avoid membership in A.I.’s permanent underclass. Fighting to slow the A.I. revolution now would only be an admission that you’re not good enough to join it. ♦